


diet of worms

by LittleDragonPrince



Category: Hotline Miami (Video Game)
Genre: 1989, Author Makes As Many 80's Refs As Appropriate In A Serious Fic, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Divinity, F/M, Jacket & Hooker are dating but it's largely unimportant, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 16:10:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3616197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDragonPrince/pseuds/LittleDragonPrince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>divinity</b> : <i>n.</i></p><ol>
  <li>having divine attributes; ranking below God but above humans</li>
</ol>
            </blockquote>





	diet of worms

**Author's Note:**

> (finishes writing a fic for a DLC that nobody cares about) nice.
> 
> (then immediately starts writing a fic for a cult game i haven't beaten yet) NICE.
> 
> some warnings i didnt put in the tags: drug / alcohol references, smoking, unsanitary/gross descriptions of shit, and uhh some vague yet also somehow graphic descriptions of murder, also comparing oneself to God/calling oneself a God a lot too
> 
> All the writing in parentheses is, like, it's own monologue.

There’s something in the air here, you swear to God.

Something about the sticky Miami heat that gets you day drunk, makes the asphalt walls of your craphole apartment soft and pliable.  It smells like rubber cement and cologne and, more recently, cigarettes.  She smokes, incidentally – claims it helps to wean her off all the other shit she used to take. You let her smoke to her heart’s content. You let her kiss you, too.

It must be something in the air, you reason. (Why else would you let yourself kiss her back?)

The chronic headaches start to blur into a constant droning buzz in the back of your brain, a hypnotizing melody that makes everything blurry and pleasant.  It was painful at first, enough to make you puke – crouching in a pile of garbage, covered in sweat and blood (too much blood, you didn’t expect them to bleed _so much_ ) – but now it’s numbing. You’re doped up on adrenaline and summertime. S’like laughing gas. 

The jobs get harder. The pay gets bigger. You keep a box of rubber masks under the backseat of your car. They came with names. Written on the back of each of them, in blocky Sharpie letters.  When you slip on that mask you stop being, well, _you_ , and become somebody (some _thing_ ) else.

Thinking like that makes it… better, somehow.  When you strip the rubber mask from your head and throw it in the tub to rinse off later, you can be a different man. An innocent man.

It’s not a perfect excuse, but it helps you sleep at night.

You don’t have dreams anymore, not that you can tell. Sometimes, though - sometimes you swear you’re sleepwalking. Either you haven’t had a dream since you moved here, or you just haven’t woken up yet.  You could open your eyes any second and be back in Moniac, fresh out of high school and with a different phone number.

It’s an oddly comforting theory, for awhile, but then you met the man in the sewers, with missing teeth and swollen eyes, who begged for you to comfort him, to tell him lies. You thought of all the people he must’ve killed, all the blood on his hands (as you pried the mask from his shaking fingers - teeth and scales). You let him fall back asleep, choking on his own torn up vocal chords. It was not a painless death. You don’t think such a thing exists anymore.

It – the mask, that is – smells like feces and plaque and gum disease. You only wear it when you’re pissed, when you want to see the blood and guts and gore and the satisfying _crunch_ of a man’s collarbone. It’s (the slaughter, that is) cathartic, really.

It was after one such job when you went and grabbed a VHS copy of Top Gun before returning to the apartment. She greeted you at the door that day, slouched by the bathroom and wearing _your_ Supertramp t-shirt, a Marlboro in one hand and some chocolate robin eggs in the other.

“Welcome home, babe,” she smiled, though it was sad, her eyes not looking at your face but at the blood splatters on your clothes.  She pushed off the wall, kissed you on the cheek, and said with nonchalance, “You should go wash that shit off. Y’know.”

You did know. You almost told her as such. You almost told her that you wished things were different, wished she had found some other man and you had found some other job. Instead you smiled back, slid the jacket off your shoulders, and asked her to pour you some beer.  As she walked away, your eyes followed the glimmering gold cross around her neck.  It was – _is_ – always hanging there.  It’s a small, undefined trinket, one of the less flashy things she owns.  It bounces against her chest a bit when she wears her favorite push-up bra.

You’ve never been a religious man, but after the jobs start you find yourself praying.  Not for anything in particular, but under you breath, as you scrub the viscera from your hands.  You mumble for strength, for love, for freedom.

Never for redemption. (But for the power to redeem.)

The bat hangs heavy on your shoulder, clutched tight in your right hand. Your left covers his mouth. You’re crouched on the tiled bathroom floor, knees pinning his body down, and you can see every inch of his terrified face for that split moment, you can watch the frantic light in his eyes. He can’t see you though, only the rubber, the hollowed eyes, and it’s so, so _easy_ to break skin, just four-five hits. The soft thump of flesh-on-wood, the crack of bone, the wet gurgle of brain and blood; it’s a hymn, almost. The body goes lax beneath you, and your breath catches in the front of the mask, hot and heavy and _holy_.

(You wonder if this is how God feels.)

You never question how the money gets there, how it is they know that you’ve done a good job. It shows up in a discreet yellow envelope, marked with your address, bland and unremarkable in every way. It always comes in cash, a thick bundle of it, and you always give a little bit to her so she can go get her cigarettes. She never says “thank you” but then again, you never say “I love you, too”.  Fair’s fair.

Soon, you have more money than you know what to do with, so you don’t do anything with it. You buy pink grapefruit flavored malt coolers en masse, take your girlfriend out to the theatre when the third Indiana Jones movie’s released even though she hates it, and binge smoke until your chest aches from the hot tar and tobacco.

It gets to be a dull life. You throw yourself into your “work” as a distraction, and it half-way works. The guilt is better than the boredom, and the rush of the kill is better than both of those things anyhow.

The fear you cannot pray away, you take out on the mobsters.  As you said – cathartic.

Either way, you feel yourself start to slip after awhile.  The days become static. You remember less and less, forget more and more. Life melts into a routine: wake up, check the answering machine, grab your keys, (break his head open, feel his lungs spasm between your legs, one two three four), go shopping, come home and shower, then go back to sleep.

The masks, they came with names, but you can’t remember your own.  It’s been so long since anyone has called you by a name that was yours. You stop being a person, start being a thing, a tool of retribution and violence. A living weapon.

You forget your own face, too, to the point that you look in the mirror and expect to see a rooster, or a tiger, or a rabbit, or an animal (creature, beast, _monster_ ).

You can see every inch of your terrified face, the frantic light in your eyes, and it’s so, so _easy_ to break skin when you smash your knuckles right through the glass.

She’s pissed at you, of course, but also a little bit scared. She says the jobs are doing things to your head, it isn’t good for you to go out and – and – _well._ She hates saying what it is you do exactly, so she doesn’t, and you slam the door on your way out.

What the fuck does she know anyway. The only thing keeping you sane is the jobs; the only time you’re a person (a holy being, a fallen angel, maybe even a God) is when you’re clutching the grip of an Uzi or the handle of a blade. This is who (what) you are, and without it you are nothing but a drunken idiot in his craphole apartment, smoking Marlboros and growing old.

So you do the jobs and you get the money and you know you aren’t the good guy.  You know you’ve never been the good guy.  Your apartment gets hotter and hotter, until it’s hard to swallow and the atmosphere is suffocating.  When you’re alone and without a job, your lungs burn with the flavor of sweat and ennui.

But when you breathe the fresh Miami air in through the thick rubber of your mask, it tastes absolutely _divine_.

**Author's Note:**

> this is mostly just me wanting to explore the psyche of Jacket, who is a character i have fallen in love with despite him never saying a word. people say he's a meaningless character cuz we know nothing about him, but that's not true.
> 
> we know he leaves his clothes lying all over the floor. we know he stops doing that once he has a girlfriend.
> 
> we know that, when he comes across a girl whose been brutally assaulted & is near death, he takes her back to his place and lets her stay.
> 
> we know that after his first job he puked. we know he never did that again.
> 
> we know that his first reaction to finding out who killed his girlfriend & almost him was to go home, grab his jacket, and head to the police station to find & talk to them (not caring that he had to kill all the cops on the way in).
> 
> we know he has no problem hurting people, if it's the means to an end.
> 
> like.... we know plenty about jacket to start caring about him. bullshit 2 everyone who says he's nothing.
> 
> this ain't the best work i coulda done but i've had a rough few weeks so think of this as my therapy. it's really choppy in some places, i think one day i might fix it up but take it as it is now, please.
> 
> soo yeah that's it. that's the end of the fic. thnx ✌


End file.
